An Act of Civil Obedience

It reminds me of the stuff Saul Alinsky used to do in Chicago back in the day. I read one of his books, Rules for Radicals. He was really involved in working with communities to demand equitable hiring practices by companies. The stuff they did, the power that they leveraged was just so creative. Some examples. A major department store had no African Americans in management positions, even though a lot of the lower level staff were black and had worked there for years. So one day they got a huge number of people, almost all black, to shop at the store. A lot of white people wouldn't even enter the store. Then, 5 minutes before closing, all the people that had been standing around browsing showed up at the cashiers wanting to pay with credit cards. Hundreds of people were organized to do this. They only had to do that once. Another time a company wasn't budging on treating their employees fairly, so they threatened them where it hurt. Everyone ate a lot of beans. Then they got tickets to the opera. To a show where most of the company's executives were going. Again, they only had to do that once.